FIFA, the ethically challenged arbiter of the world’s most popular sport, has proposed a short-list of three for the Ballon d’Or, the top individual accolade: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Manuel Neuer. Like most sports awards, fans are rooting for their favorites—but unlike many others, it’s hard to make a statistical case that one player is more valuable than another. That often makes the award merely a measure of prolific goal-scoring—but as any manager will tell you, that’s probably not enough to carry a successful soccer team. How can we improve?

Get Better Statistics

Soccer comes with fewer starts and stops, a bigger field, infrequent scoring and more players in action at once than most well-measured sports, so it’s just hard to get a handle on what factors separate victory from defeat. It’s even harder to separate an individual’s influence from a team’s result—which at least Microsoft seems to have figured out. Only recently have we seen more serious statistical efforts, but that data is largely proprietary and hard to obtain for analysis.

Don’t Forget About Goalkeepers

Messi and Ronaldo are forwards, which makes it easier to compare their play, but Neuer is a goalkeeper, and no one has really found a way to compare the value of goalkeepers to outfield players—much to the "keepers" detriment. Should a goal stopped be treated equally to a goal scored? How much should quality defenders influence our judgement of a keeper—and how much should quality midfielders influence our judgement of a forward? Add in Neuer’s unusual willingness to leave the penalty area and play as an outfield defender, and you’ve got another wrinkle.

Weigh Competitions More Fairly

The voters in the Ballon d’Or—international coaches and captains, as well as journalists—are expected to consider performance in professional competitions (which, for the best, can include a national league, a national cup and the international Champion’s League) and while playing for their countries’ national team, which this year means the World Cup.

That requires factoring in the strength of different leagues and even different teams. Neuer’s Germany won the World Cup, and only twice has the award been given to a player whose team didn’t in a World Cup year. Ronaldo, the favorite for this year’s award because of his record scoring for his professional team, saw his national team eliminated in the early stages of the tournament—but does that reflect more on him or the quality of his team? Meanwhile, Messi’s Argentina lost to Germany in the final, but he won an award as the tournament’s best player. How do you weigh those factors?

But, the Voters Might Not Be Too Far Off

One effort to quantify player performance comes from Luis Nunes Amaral, a physicist who studies complex systems. On something of a lark, he and some collaborators developed a metric to track players during the 2008 European Cup, treating the team as a network and prizing those players who kept possession of the ball (so that opponents couldn’t score) and set up scoring chances (so their team could). Not surprising, the Spanish team’s supreme artist of passing, Xavi Hernandez, came out on top in that tournament’s rating. Amaral launched a start-up to update and expand this metric, selling their analysis to teams and player agents.

He kindly made us this chart, showing some top players in the last four seasons in La Liga and the English Premiere League:

Season 4 is the current professional season so far; there was no available data for La Liga in 2010-2011. (Data: Luis Nunes Amaral)

In a word, dominance by the two leading contenders for the award, and in particular, by the favorite. But this alignment between statistics and popular opinion may be because Messi and Ronaldo are such outliers—the best players, Amaral says, reside around 70 on his ranking, with Messi and Ronaldo jockeying for the top spot in the 80 range. “There have never been players like Ronaldo and Messi,” Amaral says. “Those two guys are so extraordinary, so remarkable.”

Amaral says that soccer is in a “pre-moneyball situation, and analytics could play a much more important role in these kind of decisions.” Perhaps in a few years, when age brings Messi and Ronaldo’s current run of excellence to a close, soccer statistics will have advanced enough that when the outliers aren’t obvious, we’ll still be able to know who’s best.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.